Fred Miranda wrote:
If you shoot with a Canon 5D Mark III, download the third alpha version. This is a small update, mostly with bug fixes and a few handy tweaks.

New or improved features:
Card test at startup
Histogram and waveform moved to bottom
New experimental display for focus peaking (extreme sharpness)
16:9 bars for anamorphic preview
Focus box moves faster (not yet customizable)
After taking a picture and pressing Zoom In right away, you can scroll through pictures
Saturation boost when adjusting white balance
Warnings for bad settings (e.g. if you set picture quality to JPEG instead of RAW by mistake)
Dim the red LED while recording (make it less distracting)
Release notes | Free download link ...Show more →

I wonder if they will ever manage to access the full 1920x1080 buffer and not the re-scaled cut down buffer that makes using an external recorder more or less pointless with it even though it makes it a clean HDMI or if we will have to wait until April.

That said ML adds a lot of great usability features, at least some of which surely should have been in the camera in the first place.

dwweiche wrote:
Why doesn't Canon hire these developers or contract them out to develop this as standard?

Because of the MBA/Marketing types. If they wanted that in there it would be in there. Have no doubt that the Canon engineers can do this themselves and probably want to, many an engineer is greatly frustrated by the decisions of his design team non-engineer boss.

skibum5 wrote:
Because of the MBA/Marketing types. If they wanted that in there it would be in there. Have no doubt that the Canon engineers can do this themselves and probably want to, many an engineer is greatly frustrated by the decisions of his design team non-engineer boss.

true, functions are crippled or not included for market segmentation purposes

CW100 wrote:
true, functions are crippled or not included for market segmentation purposes

Don't even want to remember the meetings I've stomped out of nor the words (not suitable for a family audience) when thwarted by marketing droids with pie charts proving that something they've never seen (much less have a clue about) won't sell.

Slightly off-topic but somewhat related, can anyone provide me with the link to the Magic Lantern download for the 7D? I remember reading about it on this forum but not knowing much about Magic Lantern (I thought that it was a reference to the guide books!), I didn't take it too seriously. How good are these and how reliable are they?

I won't say it's impossible to mess up your camera but.... It is supposed to be pretty stable. I use it on my 5D2 and 60D all the time. ML will occasionally do funky stuff like lock up my cameras but I just remove the battery, restart and I'm usually good to go unless the camera doesn't like that specific card with ML.

Once with an earlier version of ML, my 5D2 got screwed up a bit and the back LCD didn't go back to normal for a while. It scared me enough to where I didn't load up ML until the newest, stable version came out.

That said, I LOVE ML. It's the best addition to the Canon firmware I've used and a Godsend for shooting video!

racoll wrote:
Slightly off-topic but somewhat related, can anyone provide me with the link to the Magic Lantern download for the 7D? I remember reading about it on this forum but not knowing much about Magic Lantern (I thought that it was a reference to the guide books!), I didn't take it too seriously. How good are these and how reliable are they?